Hobby Boss 1/48 FJ-4B Fury By Will Riepl

Overview

The Hobby Boss 1/48 FJ-4 has already been reviewed by Gary Meinert a few months ago, and aside from a new box and new decals, this kit is pretty much the same. I will refer you back to Gary’s original review for the discussion on the plastic, and just outline the decals in this review.

The Decals

This kit comes with two marking choices, one Navy and one Marine FJ-4B. Starting with the Navy aircraft, this is the CAG bird from VA-214 “Volunteers.” This unit had their tails painted blue, with white trim. The CAG plane went one further, though, with three colored stripes painted on the tail in addition to the blue band, and CATG-4 painted on the fuselage sides. Unfortunately, the decals for this attractive Fury are a bit of a let-down. First off, the tail stripes, which should be red, yellow and orange, are depicted as black, yellow and red. Further complicating things, the ND tail code is shown at an angle to the other trim, when in fact it should be parallel to the white stripes. The CATG-4 text is the wrong shape as well, and the nose numbers are less than half the size they need to be. Finally, the intake warning decal states “Danger In Take” instead of “Danger Intake.” Given that there are two good photos of this plane in the Ginter book on the FJ-4, it is surprising that these errors made it into this sheet.

Moving on to the Marine Fury, this is an FJ-4B from VMF-323 “Death Rattlers.” The markings chosen here are for the later period of this squadron, when their Furies were painted up with attractive diamond-based trim. This includes tail and wing stripes, a diagonal fuselage band, and a scalloped nose design, all with diamonds in them. The decals look to capture these designs quite well, but like the above option, they are let down in the color choices. The decal sheet has these as black and yellow, when VMF-323 in fact had brown and yellow-orange for their trim colors. Also like the Navy example, the nose numbers are incorrect, in this case being too narrow.

The decals are quite nicely printed, which makes these mistakes all the more problematic. It would be very difficult to correct either of these schemes without doing some major work, and in fact it would probably be easier to just use the decals as masking templates to paint on the actual colors.

Conclusion

While the decals are a bit of a letdown, the kit itself is still light years ahead of the old Matchbox kit, so it is worth picking up, especially since the price really cannot be beat.